A Closer Look At Jack Dorsey's Twin Startups, Twitter And Square

There are few startups that are more the product of one man's
vision and imagination than Twitter and Square.

Jack Dorsey, the inventor of both, is clearly a "vision"
entrepreneur. Much has been written about his original, brilliant
idea for Twitter and how it came from working in dispatch and,
even earlier, from a childhood fascination with cities and
computers.

And it's fascinating to look at what the two startups have
different and have in common, and how Square learned from
Twitter's successes and setbacks. It's like reading two books by
the same novelist that have completely different subject matters,
and yet are eerily similar. In many ways, Square is like
Twitter's mirror universe twin.

Here's what's similar about them:

They both start with a really simple,
why-didn't-someone-think-of-this-sooner idea. Why not
let anyone post short status updates to their friends? Why not
let anyone accept plastic payments? Indeed: why not?

They're both incredibly ambitious. Twitter
wants to, in Facebook's parlance, "connect the world", and
actually has a much better chance than Facebook, because it's
so simple: short bursts of information; anyone can follow
anyone. Square wants to carry all of the world's monetary
transactions.

They're both "information networks." That's
how Twitter sometimes describes itself. Dorsey's original
vision for Twitter came from working in dispatch and seeing a
stream of tiny bursts of information of everything going on in
a city in real time. But Square is also an information network.
In public talks, Dorsey talks of being able to build a
real-time visualization of transactions going on in Square, and
of using Square to build a real-life equivalent of Google
Analytics for merchants to better track what people buy and
when.

They're both democratizers. Twitter, of media.
Square, of financial transactions.

Here's what's different about them:

Square has a built-in business model. This is
the obvious one. It's almost as if Dorsey was so tired of
hearing
endless speculation about how Twitter would make money that
he said to himself: "Next time, I'll have a solid, obvious
business model from the get-go so I don't have to hear that
crap anymore." And so he has.

Square is FAT. Twitter was the archetypal
"lean startup", before the expression became popular. A team of
three people (none
of whom were Evan Williams or Biz Stone) got together and
hacked together this raw prototype, threw it up, and saw where
it took them. Users and developers came up with @replies,
hashtags, mobile apps, etc. Users turned Twitter into a web and
app-based media platform instead of the SMS-based status update
service it was first intended as. Twitter's job was just to try
to keep up. Square is the opposite. It has to be: it's not a
social media startup, it's in the highly serious (and highly
regulated) payments space. Dorsey talks about how Square is
many startups within a startup: there is hardware, and
software, and security, and compliance... And instead of
launching something incomplete based on an idea and see where
it evolved, he built the startup in stealth for many many
months until it was completely polished and refined. When Jack
Dorsey built Twitter, he was wearing a
nose ring. When Jack Dorsey built Square, he was wearing
Prada suits and Rolex.

Square shares zero investors with Twitter. At
least VCs. Boy, Dorsey is really unhappy about having been
fired from Twitter.

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